What I’m Reading – Friday, June 10, 2016

All of this may not be my vocation, but I’m enjoying it, and the stability is giving me some space for creativity. It’s a huge relief to not continually be asking myself “what should I do with my life?”. The question does still linger, but I’ve stopped fretting about finding the perfect answer and am taking the time to appreciate what I’m doing now.

So it occured to me a week or two ago to ask (on twitter) the question, “what would a modern-day version of this manual look like if it was intended to sabotage a rival dot-com or high tech startup company”? And the obvious answer is “send your best bad managers over to join in admin roles and run their hapless enemy into the ground”.

Worth it for the link to the CIA’s delightful Simple Sabotage Field Manual as well as the hilarious comments. Colleagues, take note!

My mother was the first woman I knew who moved out of her own body. She vacated it, bit by bit: her lawn of her hair turning colors and falling out, the front porch of belly and breasts disappearing overnight, the foundation of muscle repossessed and leaving her to scoot down the stairs on her disorientingly bony ass. She disappeared. Her hair grew back, but her face changed shape so sharply that friends who she hadn’t seen in a year did not recognize her. She was like any other woman; she loved the attention her new body received and being able to buy clothes in any store she saw.

This idea that a backpacker wants to set themselves apart from other tourists because they may have an intellectual or humanitarian interest in a given place and are somehow less responsible for the consumerism and inequality enforced by traveler/tourist communities. Yet at the same time engaging in bargaining or price gouging in order to save a buck under the guise of having equal treatment as locals. Yet when you come from a country that is responsible for the economic state of many countries that you travel through, a country that was a former colony of the country that you’re from or simply put, your money is valued higher — it’s not about equity at all.